


The Way Up

by dirtybinary



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-22
Updated: 2014-05-22
Packaged: 2018-01-26 02:44:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1671773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a long road to recovery, but Bucky's got this. Breaking into Steve's apartment sounds like a good start.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way Up

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Путь наверх](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3618639) by [BlueSunrise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueSunrise/pseuds/BlueSunrise)



> Translated into Chinese by Raghel/Detourme: Parts [1-4](http://detourme.lofter.com/post/3f95da_17b9f71) & [5-8](http://detourme.lofter.com/post/3f95da_17dcfe7).

i.

The Winter Soldier starts breaking into Steve Rogers's apartment on a nightly basis, which in retrospect is a career-ending move.

He's got a perfectly sound rationale for doing it, even though it won't help salvage the calamitous helicarrier mission (and part of his mind is bewildered by the very idea of doing things without orders but a bigger part, an _older_ part, is convinced this is somehow necessary). He needs food and a warmer sweater and he has to find out everything he can about the Captain, about this strange, inexplicable man who was on the bridge and in the helicarrier and in the dark, unswept crevasses at the back of the Soldier's mind.

So he goes.

Captain America lives in a cramped second-storey apartment in a nondescript building with no security except for an undercover agent living downstairs, whom the Soldier has no trouble evading. The Captain—his mission, his target— _Steve_ —is asleep on one half of a bed that looks empty and oversized even for his big frame. The Soldier stands over him for a moment, trying to pinpoint what is simultaneously familiar about and wrong with this picture. He can't. His fingers move to grasp his pistol, never far from reach. Killing him would be the easiest thing in the world.

But it won't put the helicarriers back in the sky, or undo the fact that he once dove into the Potomac to fish this man and his ridiculous suit out of the water one-handed. He's come here for supplies and reconnaissance, not murder. So he tucks the gun away, and turns to his self-appointed mission.

He appropriates a loaf of bread and a bottle of mineral water from the kitchen, and a crumpled hoodie from the bottom of the laundry bin. Afterwards, just because he can, he explores every corner of the apartment on silent cat feet and finds a pocket-sized photograph on the bedside table not three inches from where the Captain is sleeping. It's old, the sepia hues faded, the edges frayed and worn, but the Soldier recognises the young man in uniform straight away. The man in the museum, the man in the mirror; Sgt. Barnes, 107th.

He steals the picture, too.

(Later, after he's found himself a park bench to sleep on and the bread's taken off the edge of his hunger, he finds himself wondering what the hell he did that for. There are any number of houses he could have broken into without fear of discovery, but the Captain will know for sure that someone's been in his flat, and _who_. This is a tactical error of the worst kind. The Soldier resolves to leave town at dawn and run for his life. 

Still, he thinks, settling into an almost-pleasant doze, it was worth the risk. The hoodie is so big and soft and warm, and smells so reassuring. So _nice_ , which—though the Soldier doesn't remember—is a word he hasn't had cause to use in over seventy years.)

 

 

ii.

He goes back to the apartment the next night, and the next, and every one after that.

The lack of security unsettles him. The Captain seems not to care that his apartment is being burgled by a hungry ghost who systematically cleans out his fridge but leaves his valuables untouched. On the contrary, he seems to become even more careless. The windows are never locked, the motion sensors are permamently out of order, there's a new bag of warm sandwiches on the kitchen counter every night to replace the ones that keep disappearing mysteriously, and _oh_ , that's a lot of money on the dresser even by today's standards.

The apartment is quite possibly the most dangerous place the Soldier has ever been. It's a trap, it must be a trap. The possibility that the Captain is leaving food out for no reason other than to feed him beats at the hatches of his mind but is never admitted. Things like that don't happen. It doesn't work that way, missions don't do that, they take out guns and shoot at you, not do bizarre things like buy you sandwiches and pull you out from under fallen rafters and throw their shields out of helicarriers. 

But the Winter Soldier isn't programmed to know fear (except when the cold metal clamps with the electrodes come down around his face, and the pain arrives in force; then he isn't a soldier any more, much less The Soldier, just a vacuum into which terror and panic and other strange feelings diffuse). So he keeps coming, and he has all the twenty-seven escape routes memorised, and runs through them in his head even as he pockets the nightly sandwiches and deliberates if he should steal the fluffy blue scarf that's materialised on the back of the kitchen chair.

One time the Captain isn't home for three nights running, though the food is there as always. The Soldier stays a while longer then. He washes his hair in the bathroom sink. He shaves with the Captain's razor; his beard is getting unruly and starting to attract stares. He finds a screwdriver and tightens a loose plate in his cybernetic arm. He used to have people to do this for him, but he's resigned himself to the fact that his HYDRA handlers aren't going to come for him, and if they did, they'd probably shoot him on sight. 

He makes a lot of noise, just to see if the agent who lives downstairs will come up and try to arrest him, but if she hears him, she does nothing about it. It's strange, and the solitude makes him uneasy.

He's almost relieved when the Captain comes back. He looks terrible—there's a cut on his forehead, and a giant purple bruise on one cheekbone. The sight conjures up memories, recent ones from the exploding helicarrier and the bank of the Potomac, and older ones from—where? An alleyway, narrow and grubby and lined with garbage from a knocked-over trashcan, in a place called… Brooklyn, was that it?

The Soldier doesn't know where Brooklyn is or why the bruises trouble him so much. He finds his sandwiches and stuffs them inside his hoodie. The scarf too, for good measure. Then he turns to go, but somehow his feet carry him not to the open window but back to the bed. In the last one and a half minutes, the Captain has managed to kick away all the blankets. He lies curled up on his side like a child in the too-big bed, shivering a little. In the dim light, the Soldier's sharp eyes note that his arms are goosebumped.

This is none of his business. But the Soldier's programming seems to have shorted out, and he can't dart to the window like he wants, and there's someone else moving for him. Sgt. Barnes of the 107th—curse him—gathers up the fallen blankets and lays them, light as a butterfly's wing, over the sleeping form on the bed, over the dumb little punk from Brooklyn who could never go more than a few days without getting thrown into dumpsters or adding a few black eyes to his collection. The movement comes naturally to his muscles, like he's done this before.

To his abject horror, the Captain's eyes fly open, and a gentle hand closes around his wrist.

"Bucky," Steve says drowsily. He's smiling. Why is he smiling? People don't smile when they wake up in the dead of night to find a burglar in their house. "Thought I heard you."

Unless, of course, they weren't sleeping, or it isn't a burglar. None of the Soldier's training has taught him the proper procedure to deal with someone holding his hand. It's even the cybernetic one, cold and hard and awful, and Steve is holding it like he doesn't know it could crush his bones to pulp if the Soldier so chooses. But he knows.

"Sorry I wasn't here the last few nights," Steve says. "I was away on a mission, raiding a safe house. But I'm back now. Have you eaten the sandwiches? They'll get cold."

He sounds perfectly at ease, as if he's had many a pleasant conversation with armed assassins in his bedroom—which, going by the other strange things about him, might even be true—but there's something taut and nervous in the muscles of his face, like he can't quite believe this is happening and doesn't know what to do with it. Like he's just saying the first thing that comes to mind because he's preoccupied, his eyes—they're not bleary at all, he wasn't even asleep—roving across the Soldier's face and cataloguing all his features. And the Soldier finds that alarming, because if even Steve—Steve, the one familiar point of reference he's got in this new world—doesn't know what to do, then who does?

Heart pounding, the Soldier fumbles in his hoodie with his free hand, but instead of whipping out his gun he finds himself holding the sepia photograph. He flings it at Steve like it's a spider, or a talisman to keep him safe. "I was just," he says inanely, "coming to return this."

His voice is a rasp, like the rattle of some disused old machinery. Steve picks up the picture with the hand that's not latched on to the Soldier's. It takes a moment, but he smiles. His eyes, the Soldier notices with some unnamed panic, are filled with tears. "Just the photo? Do I get the real thing too?"

The Soldier realises belatedly that his knees have given way, and that he's sitting on the edge of the bed. He wants to wipe the tears away but he's terrified he might accidentally take off Steve's head instead. And now Steve is sitting up in bed, holding on to both his hands, and the Soldier can't think what to do, it's like he's been deactivated. It's Bucky who responds, who leans into the warmth and gasps aloud at how good it feels, who carefully tangles his flesh fingers into the hem of Steve's shirt to make sure he doesn't go away. 

"Well," Steve says presently, his voice low and warm in Bucky's ear, "I'm going to take that as a yes."

 

 

iii.

"Bucky Barnes," says the Soldier experimentally, sitting at the kitchen table while waffles and jam are unloaded onto the plate in front of him. "James Buchanan Barnes. Sergeant Barnes."

"That's right," says the Captain encouragingly. He was a long time in the shower this morning, and his eyes are red and swollen. Bucky has already grown used to thinking of him as Steve, or even Stevie, so intimate, a familiarity only half remembered. 

"I went to the museum."

"I thought you might." Steve hands him a fork and knife. "Go ahead. I'm getting rather good at making these."

He's right. The waffles are good, even better than the sandwiches, which were practically ambrosia after the soggy burgers the Soldier used to scavenge from trashcans before he started breaking into Steve's apartment. Bucky soon finds that he can't stop eating. He's just so _hungry_. He looks at Steve between waffles, because he's had four already and he's not sure if this is allowed, but Steve just smiles at him and by Bucky's count he's already had six, so he figures four can't be too bad.

The blond agent from downstairs comes in just as he's finishing up waffle number five. "Oh," she says. "Finally got him to stay for breakfast?"

The Soldier's already out of his chair and halfway to the window by the time Steve gets up, because he'll eat their food but hell if he'll let them capture him and take his newfound freedom away. "Bucky, it's all right," Steve says. "It's just Sharon, she's a friend."

The agent holds up her empty palms, so the Soldier can see that she's unarmed. " _Just_ Sharon," she repeats.

"Oh, you know what I mean."

Bucky allows Steve to guide him back to the chair and fill his mug with steaming tea. He goes back to eating, his fingers rather tight around the handle of the knife, his eyes following the agent around the kitchen. She looks familiar, though he can't think where he knows her from. "Sharon helped make you those sandwiches when I was away," Steve tells him.

"Oh," says Bucky. Of course he's guessed that Steve and his undercover guardian have been leaving food out for him like one might do for a stray cat, that it isn't his remarkable powers of stealth that have helped him get away with burglary after burglary, but it's still a little humiliating. 

The agent makes herself a cup of coffee, steals a banana from the fruit bowl, and leaves. Bucky finishes waffle number six. 

"Bucky," says Steve, when he sees him looking uncertainly at the platter by the oven, "you can have as much as you want." And then, "Go on, help yourself."

This is such a mystifying order that the Soldier doesn't obey at once. He's never been told to help himself; he just takes whatever implements people put in his hands and finds a way to kill other people with them. Even before (and he knows there _was_ a Before, a life in Brooklyn in between the back-alley scuffles), there was never enough to go around. He'd be the one telling skinny little Stevie to eat up, bringing all his food over and rattling the rickety kitchen table with his toe whenever he felt his stomach about to rumble, because he was big, he was strong, he didn't need so much food.

Steve is watching him from across the table, looking concerned. "Hey, what's the matter?"

Bucky comes out of his reverie. They aren't in Brooklyn any longer, and he's not sure what will happen to him if he asks a question. But he's never seen anything resembling HYDRA's mind-wiping equipment in all his visits to the apartment, and he doesn't think Steve goes in for that sort of thing. He says, tentatively, "Am I your prisoner now?"

Steve drops his fork with a clatter. Bucky scoots his chair back, nervous. "No! Why on earth would you think that?"

Bucky doesn't say anything, but he's thinking, _Why not?_

"Look," says Steve. "I asked Director Fury what would happen if I found you, and he said that for all intents and purposes you'll be considered a rescued prisoner of war. A veteran. I'm sure someone will want to ask you questions and things, but that's about it. You're safe, you're free. No one will hurt you."

"So," Bucky says slowly, while he tries to work out what this means, "I can leave if I want to?" 

Steve's face falls. He looks away from Bucky, down at his empty plate. "Well," he says, "yes, of course."

"Oh." It's good enough for him, having the option to go. Options are something he hasn't had for years, and he'll hoard as many of them as he can get. "Well, I'm not. Leaving, that is."

Steve looks up. He's got a smile again, small and hopeful. "You won't find better waffles out there, you know," he says, and Bucky knows he's joking, but he believes it as wholeheartedly as he's ever believed anything.

 

 

iv.

Steve barely lets Bucky out of his sight at all. It's like he thinks Bucky is some miracle he's conjured up by sheer force of will, and that he'll disappear if Steve isn't there to hold him up. Bucky isn't entirely sure that's not true. Steve is on the phone a lot, mostly to someone called Sam but also once or twice to a Nat and a Fury, but he never leaves to meet any of them. Bucky, who is just rediscovering the alternative to isolation, is more grateful than he has words to say.

He rapidly discovers that they live on a checkerboard of good days and bad days, black and white and black and white except not so regular.

On good days Steve draws and Bucky watches. One time Steve tries sketching him, metal arm and all, but it makes Bucky's eyes well up and his heart ache in a strange way and Steve, misinterpreting the response, sticks to landscapes and motorbikes from then on. Sometimes they sit on the couch and watch TV. Steve has a small collection of what he claims are the only accurate documentaries ever made about the Howling Commandos (said in a slightly hurt, slightly reproachful voice) and truth be told, Bucky can't remember doing any of those things, but he likes watching the man with the blue jacket and the big gun in action at the Captain's side anyway, because it makes him feel like he was a hero in a past life. On the best days they go out for a jog around the block, or bake cupcakes for Sharon and chicken out of actually giving them to her in case she gets food poisoning, or Steve lets a man called Stark come to examine Bucky's arm.

On the bad days Bucky wakes screaming, and then all he can do is rock himself back and forth for hours while Steve frets and tries to pretend he's not fretting.

It's the remembering that hurts the most, and sometimes Bucky's not sure he ever wants to remember at all. One day, the very worst of days, the Stark man is fixing something in his arm when suddenly he's back in the Room, strapped to the Chair (and he thinks of them with big bright capital letters because he's lived a hundred years but those are the things he remembers best of all) and then Stark is flying across the room like a rag doll before Bucky even knows he's moved a muscle, and then all at once he's looking down at another man called Stark, at the burning wreckage of a car wrapped around a tree, and then he's crying so hard he actually throws up and everyone is asking him what's wrong but he can't bring himself to tell them in case Steve throws him out.

It hurts so bad that he does confess later on, when they're alone and he's sitting on the couch, wrapped up in three blankets and Steve's arms. _I killed Howard_ is a dreadful thing to hear at the best of times, even when it's not coming from a friend whose life the man in question once helped save, and Steve doesn't get angry but Bucky's developed an exhaustive mental dictionary of All of Steve Rogers's Expressions (or maybe he just rediscovered the one he already had) and he knows the revelation has upset him.

"Not because of what you did," Steve says gently, "but what they made you do. It wasn't you in there, you know."

"It was my body," Bucky says in a monotone. They've had some variant of this conversation before. "It was my finger on the trigger."

Steve's hugs are one of the things Bucky has learnt he loves, along with waffles for breakfast and lavender-scented bubble baths, and he's terrified to move in case Steve pulls away. But Steve doesn't, only tugs him in closer. "You were the gun," he says, "and HYDRA pulled the trigger. You were as much a victim as Howard and any of the others. And you got away from them, you saved my life when they ordered you to kill me, remember?"

"It doesn't undo all the rest of it." 

"Of course not. But it's a good start." Steve shifts his weight and adjusts his position, and Bucky feels a twinge of anticipatory abandonment. "Now, are you going to hug me properly or not? You can put your arm around me, you know. _Both_ your arms."

Bucky looks down at his cybernetic arm, still humming ominously from the tension in his muscles. One morning he'd accidentally brushed Steve's hand with it on the way to the bathroom and Steve had jumped about a foot in the air, but he'd said it was just that the cold steel had startled him. "It's a weapon," Bucky says. "I wouldn't put it around you any more than I'd hold a knife to your throat." ( _Again_ , he thinks but doesn't say aloud.)

Steve doesn't back off. To Bucky's alarm, he runs a finger down the plates of the metal arm. It whirs and clanks a bit more, and the plates recalibrate themselves, rising and falling in a smooth wavelike motion. "Was that like a shiver?" Steve asks.

Bucky shrugs. "It does that sometimes."

"As weapons go, it's pretty versatile," Steve says. "A gun's just a gun, you know, but knives, you could kill people with them, or dice carrots, or make a wood carving. Same with your arm."

"Huh." 

"No, look, I've just thought of something." Steve starts to get up, and Bucky reflexively makes a small sound of protest and leans into him. "I just need to grab a few things so I can do a demonstration. I'll be back in a minute, I swear." 

He actually comes back in forty-seven seconds, holding his sketchbook and a set of coloured pencils. Bucky sighs. "Steve, I can't draw."

"I know." Steve takes his metal hand and puts a black pencil in it.

"I'll break it," Bucky says warningly, because he's seen how Steve treats his art things as if they were his newborn children.

"You won't," says Steve. He's already opened his sketchbook to a blank page.

"I'm not even left-handed."

"Neither am I. This won't be pretty, but it'll prove my point."

Steve cups his warm hand over Bucky's cold one and doesn't comment when the metal plates abruptly recalibrate themselves again. (Or shiver, as he puts it.) Bucky's remembered by now how Steve gets when he sets his mind on something, so he saves his breath and doesn't argue. Steve adjusts his grip in a deft, no-nonsense motion, like he's not even worried that Bucky might break his pencil or, for God's sake, his fingers, and then starts to guide his hand across the page. A few rough lines and circles first, and then a person-shaped blob starts to coalesce. Bucky just stares, his eyes going from the page to the pencil in his steel fingers to Steve's hand on his own.

"Is that," he says at last, as Steve draws lines all down the blob's left arm and adds a slightly misshapen star on the shoulder, "me?"

"Well," Steve says, "yes." When Bucky glances up at him, he looks embarrassed. "Sorry, I did say it wouldn't be pretty."

"That's all right," says Bucky. Since the picture can't possibly get any worse, he pulls his left hand free of Steve's and shades in his hair, his eyes, an exaggerated cartoon scowl. For good measure, he draws a couple of guns on the blob's belt and adds a stick-figure Steve in the background, complete with shield.

"Oh, God," says Steve.

Bucky holds up their masterpiece and studies it. He feels like crying all over again, but there's an unfamiliar burn in the muscles of his face and he realises that he's smiling. He can't even remember the last time he did that. Probably the 1940s.

"You made your point," he says at last. "Punk." 

Afterwards Steve goes over the drawing with his right hand, trying to salvage it, but it's still pretty hideous. They christen it Blob Bucky and Stick-Figure Steve and hang it up on the kitchen wall. Sharon laughs so hard when she sees it, Bucky's afraid she might have a hernia. 

(The next time Tony visits with his tools and machines and a bandaged wrist, Bucky confesses about Howard and Maria. He says he's sorry but doesn't ask forgiveness, because how can you forgive a thing like that? Tony just looks at him and Bucky gets the feeling that he already knew, and then he says, "Just leave it alone, Barnes," and pulls him into a rough hug, and Bucky lets out the breath he feels he's been holding for days.)

 

  

 v.

Time passes oddly in Steve's apartment. As far as Bucky knows, he's never been out of cryo this long, never let the weeks and months carry him along instead of alighting and embarking and alighting again, leapfrogging into a different part of the calendar every time he wakes up. The good and bad days no longer make up a checkerboard with their absolute boundaries; they remind him more of a thing Tony showed them called a Möbius strip, one side flowing into the other, so he can't really tell which is which anymore.

Case in point: he wakes up in the morning—goes for a jog and gets Steve his favourite coffee and comes back and watches TV and falls asleep for several hours—and in the afternoon he's astonished to find that it's still 2014, it's not even a different day yet, and he's still Bucky Barnes instead of the Winter Soldier and he doesn't have anyone to kill. He's not sure if time has slowed down now the world's not at war, or if it always flowed like this and he never knew because he was in cryo.

"You're getting restless, man," Sam tells him when he comes over. He does that quite often, now that Bucky's recovered enough to go places on his own and not whip out a gun whenever he sees a stranger. "Might want to find yourself a hobby. A creative outlet or something."

Bucky points him to Blob Bucky and Stick-Figure Steve on the kitchen wall. "That's what happens when I get a creative outlet."

(When he first met Sam, whom Steve had made out to be an angel or at least a saint, Bucky was horrified to find out that he was none other than the winged man the Winter Soldier had once thrown from a helicarrier. After Sam had reassured him that of course he forgave him and of course he hadn't known what he was doing and of course it hadn't hurt to have the wing torn off, Bucky had gone to Steve and asked, "Do you have any friends that I haven't injured or killed yet?"

"Well, there's Sharon," Steve said, which was ironic because the very next day he and Bucky had gotten into such a loud argument that Sharon actually came running in with her gun drawn. Bucky threw Steve under a chair and stood over him with his own gun out and his metal arm flexed protectively, and she said, "Well, that sets my mind at rest," and vanished back downstairs.) 

"So," Steve says a few days later. "Sparring."

They're standing in a spare room that's been cleared out for this express purpose. The furniture has been moved to the walls, all breakables removed, Sharon duly notified that two genetically enhanced supersoldiers are about to engage in a bout of harmless violence upstairs and that she is not to be alarmed. Bucky looks doubtfully around them. "I still don't think this is a good idea."

"We could both use the exercise," Steve says. "Come on, you didn't think the drawing was a good idea either and look how that turned out."

"This is a lot more dangerous. I might hurt you."

Steve shrugs. "Try me."

So they spar.

They don't use any weapons except Steve's shield. Steve wanted to leave that out as well, since Bucky's bereft of his guns and knives and grenades and it wouldn't be fair, but Bucky points out that then he'd have to unscrew his goddamn arm as well and that would (a) take half the day and (b) leave him one-armed, and how would _that_ be fair? He regrets it after the first round, which Steve wins by knocking all the wind out of him with said shield and wrestling him to the floor, but then Bucky wins the second by snatching the shield and handing it back to Steve. With his metal arm.

He nearly wins the third too, when he flips them both into the stacked-up furniture and crashes them into a table he hopes Steve didn't like too much. But then Steve falls down and gasps like he's having an asthma attack and Bucky leans over him and the next thing he knows, he's got himself a faceful of wall, and Steve has him in a stranglehold with his arm pinned behind his back.

"Well," Steve says, panting into his ear, "looks like that works on you every time." 

"You're Captain America," Bucky chokes. "You're not allowed to fight dirty."

"Says who?"

Steve is laughing, his hands gentle now, and Bucky's arm does the shiver/recalibration thing. He's not sure if it actually went through his whole body or if it was just his imagination. Steve releases him, and they look each other over for injuries. Bucky gets a sudden sense of déjà vu. Maybe, he thinks, this is an old ritual left over from their alleyway fisticuffs in Brooklyn, or their year with the Howling Commandos. 

This is the first time in all their long lives that they've been evenly matched. The thought gives Bucky a profound, peculiar glee.

The only damages incurred are a couple of bruises and the broken table. "That went pretty well," Steve observes. "Oh, shit, you're a sore loser, aren't you? Nat said she shot you in the eye once and you fired back about three hundred times."

Well, Bucky thinks, if they can crack jokes about the shootout on the bridge now, they've made quite a lot of progress. "She didn't shoot me in the eye!"

"Goggles. Mask. Whatever."

"I _am_ a sore loser," Bucky says. "I demand a rematch."

(He wins the next one so thoroughly that the police and the fire department show up, and it's a long, long time before Steve consents to spar with him again.)

 

 

vi.

Bucky's almost relieved when Ultron comes and smashes the monotony to smithereens.

He's not even supposed to be there with the other Avengers. No one in their right mind would want a brainwashed ex-murder machine on their team. (Steve might, but whether Steve is in his right mind or not is a point of some contention.) He spends the first few days lying low at home and watching the live broadcasts with Sharon, and it's not so bad at first. But then the fighting gets worse, and he realises that he'll never forgive himself if he sits around on his ass and someone gets killed. Especially if that someone is Steve. 

He swears Sharon to secrecy, which isn't hard now that she isn't a SHIELD agent any more, and then he takes matters into his own hands.

It takes him a whole week to get to where the fighting is. Planes are hard, and besides, he has to make a stop along the way to arm himself. By the time the Winter Soldier wandered into Steve's apartment and never left, he'd been down to a pistol and a couple of knives, which are great for making Bucky feel safe at home but won't be much use against a giant robot overlord. So he raids a disused SHIELD depot (or maybe it's a HYDRA base, it's hard to tell these days) and acquires no fewer than five guns and a pouch full of grenades. Then he's ready.

The Avengers are based in an underground bunker, which isn't hard to find, but Bucky doesn't join them. (It's not easy to forget, even under such dire circumstances, that he's personally injured at least half the team in the last year alone.) Instead he shoots his way to the epicentre of the fighting, checking as he goes for any stranded civilians, and then finds himself a tall building from which to watch the action.

The first thing he sees is a star-spangled idiot racing across the deserted streets, collecting blows on his shield while he draws Ultron's minions away from the others.

Bucky recognises Natasha, the woman from the bridge, picking off the weird robot things with Hawkeye from behind an armoured car. He sees Tony and Sam swooping overhead, hears the Hulk roaring down the street, glimpses Thor's lightning flashing all around them; and he knows as surely as he now knows his name that they're all overwhelmed. None of them will reach Steve in time to help him and there's no way Steve is going to fight off that whole screaming horde on his own, there's far too many. Bucky's got to do something, and he's only got a few minutes in which to do it.

He gets down from his building and moves purposefully through the carnage, shooting as he goes.

He finds Steve almost all the way across the city. He's lying on the dusty asphalt, trapped between two burning trucks, his shield stuck in a wall out of reach and a big clanking thing advancing on him with some kind of laser gun, and wow, Bucky's sure glad he came. He vaults up onto one of the trucks, yelling to get the ugly thing's attention. Then he empties his entire clip in its face and leaps down to tackle it to the ground, knocking its gun away with his metal fist.

"Bucky?" Steve sounds delirious, like he's suffered some kind of head injury. Bucky had been planning to hit hard and vanish behind a car before any of the Avengers spotted him, but now he can't help but turn around. "What are you even—you're not supposed to— _whoa look out behind you_!"

Bucky doesn't waste time looking. He yanks the shield out of the wall and throws himself down to cover Steve, holding it up above their heads just in time. The blows rattle down so hard it's all he can do not to drop the shield, and even his cybernetic arm is whirring so loud from the strain that he's afraid it might short out. Sharp pain lances up his shoulder; he's pretty sure he's been hit. This is it, he thinks. He's come close to dying so many times that now he's facing the real thing, he can't even remember how to be scared. 

"I got this," he mutters. He drags himself up a few inches, arranging his torso so he'll land squarely on Steve like a meat shield when he falls, and then he becomes aware of fingers clawing at his belt. Steve grabs one of the grenades Bucky's got in his pouch, and lets it roll across the asphalt.

They duck down and brace themselves.

Steve isn't a grenade sort of guy on the best of days, and as far as Bucky's concerned this counts as the _worst_ of days, but the shell detonates in approximately the right direction. One of the burning trucks flips over away from them, and the blows on the shield let up a little. And then there's a shout and a sudden air current gusts around them and there are shapes in the sky, and strong hard hands close around Bucky's arm and pull him up, up, up.

They're in the air, soaring over trees and buildings. Tony's got Bucky and Sam's got Steve and everyone is yelling at everyone else, _what the hell d'you think you're doing could've been killed they had you ten to one took you long enough to come get us Bucky what Bucky no Bucky why aren't you at home_ , and it's so _much_ , and there's a strange sound emanating from Bucky's lips and he realises that he's laughing.

"It's not funny!" Tony yells, his voice oddly muffled by his face mask. "There is absolutely nothing funny about this situation! You weigh a ton and I think my foot's on fire!"

Bucky can't stop laughing. If he'd stayed home Steve would be dead by now, which means Bucky would be worse than dead, but that's okay because he _didn't_ stay home, he's here and he just did something good and useful for the first time in seventy years (fishing Steve out of the Potomac doesn't count since he's the one who put him there) and he's still holding on to Steve's shield and Steve is battered but safe and he's just so _happy_.

 

  

vii.

The bunker is cool and dim, uncomfortably like a HYDRA facility. Bucky takes off his goggles and drops all his guns but one, not wanting anyone to feel threatened by his presence or for Steve to think he's somehow relapsed into the Winter Soldier. Now that the thrill's worn off, he's not quite sure he hasn't. He paces round and round, and as soon as Steve comes into the room he steps back from the pile of weaponry and says, "Sorry."

Steve doesn't look angry, just tired and resigned and still a tiny bit concussed. He gazes at Bucky for a long moment. "I had him on the ropes," he says at last. His lips twitch upwards.

"I bet."

Steve comes closer and suddenly the distance between them goes from feet to inches. He's peering at Bucky's left shoulder, frowning. "You're hurt."

Bucky's nearly forgotten about the pain. Everyone else is wounded and he hadn't wanted to take up a doctor's time, so he took one of his knives and dug out the shrapnel himself. His hands seemed to remember the procedure, as if it's something the Winter Soldier used to do while out on missions alone. "I'm fine," he says. "I've fixed it up."

Steve rubs at his eyes with the back of his hand. "Go take a shower, all right? I'll bandage it up for you after."

He allows Steve to steer him towards the showers. It's quiet and empty; everyone else is sleeping. He can't figure out how to take off his gear when he can't move his arm, so Steve helps him with the buckles and straps and lifts all his layers over his head. But then he doesn't turn to go. He just stands there, his eyes riveted to the bloody gashes along Bucky's shoulder, the new wounds overlaid on the old scars that mark the join between metal and flesh, and he looks like he's been stabbed himself.

Bucky stares at the tiles beneath his feet, feeling cold and exposed. It takes a moment to summon up the will to speak. "You're upset with me."

"Upset?" Steve doesn't look at his face, just the wounds on his shoulder. "Yeah, I don't know if you can call it that."

That's it; this time Bucky's really gone and fucked it all up. He's scared and defensive and his shoulder hurts and it's starting to make him angry too. "I actually saved your life," he says. "In case you've forgotten already."

"Well, there's the thing. I almost wish you hadn't." Bucky stares at him, aghast, but Steve just talks over him. "See, Buck, I've lost you twice already. I don't think I'd survive it a third time. And sometimes I think I'd rather die than risk losing you all over again. I'd rather die and let you grieve than watch _you_ die and have to grieve for _you_." He's nearly shouting, his voice resounding off the high sterile walls of the bathroom and losing itself in its own echoes. "That's selfish, I know. Am I allowed to be selfish once in a while?"

Bucky stands there, trying to will himself to breathe. He's forgotten his own pain and fatigue, and all he can think is _Steve._ He can hear the loud, momentous thuds of his heart trying to ram its way out of his ribcage and escape down the sink.

"If that's where your selfishness will land us," he says, after a long moment, "then no. You're not allowed."

He thinks Steve might hit him, or storm out of there and slam the door behind him. He doesn't know which would hurt worse. He's braced for either when Steve grabs him and backs him up against the shower door, and kisses him.

It's unexpected but not surprising. They've never talked about wanting to do this, never even dared to hint at it, but somehow Bucky feels like he's been rehearsing for this moment all his life, and he gives back as good as he gets. He parts his lips and tilts his head so Steve can map out his mouth with his tongue, and then he pushes back and takes control, going up on tip-toes for better leverage, slinging his arm around Steve's shoulders to hold him in place.

They're both breathless when they pull apart. Steve is flushed all the way down his neck, and his hair is tousled as if they've done much more than just kiss. Bucky guesses he probably looks the same. He feels awkward and out of line and acutely aware of the fact that he's not wearing a shirt. His arm whirs gently and recalibrates, drawing Steve's attention away from his chest, and Bucky clears his throat.

"Well," he says, trying desperately to strike a note of levity, "did your concussion make me irresistible, or was it the leftover adrenaline?"

Steve manages to choke out a laugh. He still looks dazed. "I don't know," he says. For a moment Bucky is afraid he'll bolt. "I—don't know what to do."

Bucky looks him up and down, and sighs. He pushes the shower cubicle open. "Shut the door and join me," he says, and for once in a hundred years Steve does as he's told.

 

 

viii.

They don't really do much in the shower except kiss again. They're both too tired, and really, all Bucky wants is to be held. Steve finds a plastic stool and sits him down in the middle of the shower, and goes to work rinsing the grime and sweat out of his hair. He apologises about fifty times for raising his voice. Bucky just shuts his eyes and plants his face firmly into Steve's chest, so big and warm and comfortable, and before he knows it he's drifting off.

He dreams that he's the Winter Soldier again, but when Alexander Pierce comes to brief him on his mission, he launches a grenade in his face. He knifes the Red Skull and throws Zola out of a train, and then he's falling himself but a hand catches his wrist and when he looks up, Steve is holding him tight.

"Morning," says Steve, a little shyly. "You were muttering in Russian, I think."

He's lying in bed in the bunker, with a blanket wrapped around him. Just months ago the dream would have woken him screaming, but already its cold tentacles are slipping free of his mind, the fear sloughing from him like a dirty coat. There's a clean bandage around his left shoulder and a hot towel over a bruise on his hipbone that he hasn't even noticed before. 

"I'm fine," he says, and means it.

There are voices in the hallway outside. The others are awake and, it seems, yelling for breakfast. "By the way," Steve says, reading his expression, "they're all glad you're here. You showed up just when things got really bad."

"I don't mind what they think," Bucky murmurs. He sort of wants to go back to sleep. "Just you. And you've already made your feelings clear."

He says it just to make Steve blush again, and to his great delight it works. "You're such a jerk," Steve says. "Come on and get dressed, we've got to get back out there."

 

 

ix.

After the Ultron fiasco is settled and the Avengers get back stateside, Steve makes Bucky return his stolen guns. Bucky lets him have his way, but only because he knows exactly where the guns are kept and it'll be much easier to steal them next time. He's sure there'll be a next time. There always was in Brooklyn, and just because Steve now overtops him by half a head doesn't mean he has an excuse to slack off.

"My arm does a thing," he tells Tony at their next mechanical therapy session. They're all piled into the Avengers Tower, and Steve is upstairs sleeping off jet lag.

"Huh." Tony doesn't look up from the plate he's tightening. "So does mine."

Bucky ignores him. "It's a bit like a shiver," he says. He clenches his metal fist as hard as he can, making the gears whir and the plates do that smooth wavelike motion. "Like that, but when I'm not doing anything with it. Just—when things touch it."

Tony perks up. "What things?"

Bucky feels betrayed. He was so sure that Tony is of the persuasion that _thing_ is a perfectly adequate descriptor. "Uh. Steve, I guess. And bubbles," he adds defensively. "When I take bubble baths." 

"Bubble baths," Tony repeats. "And Steve."

"Not at the same time," Bucky hastens to clarify.

" _Really_ ," says Tony, not looking at all convinced. In fact, he looks downright gleeful an hour later, after he's plied Bucky's arm with magnets and wires and a feather in an unsuccessful attempt to elicit the shiver/recalibration reflex. "Well," he says, "this has been very enlightening. It's not part of the programming. Your arm just has a thing for Steve, I guess. And bubble baths. Not at the same time," he adds virtuously.

Bucky hits him (gently) with a screwdriver and runs away.

 

 

x.

Later in the day the Avengers go out for shawarma together. They ask Bucky along, but he's not sure he's comfortable with that yet and he doesn't want to make things awkward, so he sits it out. He watches some TV, and after they've all gone out, he steals Steve's bike and goes off on a joyride.

Steve catches up with him three towns and two hundred miles later, when the first faint stars are peering blearily through a haze of light pollution. "You know," he says, swinging Bucky firmly down from the bike, "if you were feeling left out, all you needed to do was call and I would've come back."

Bucky has no doubt that this is true. "I just wanted some fresh air," he says. He's still on a high from the wind in his hair and the sight of the city rushing past him, then falling behind and getting smaller and smaller. "We wanted a bike so bad, back when we lived in Brooklyn. You used to draw hundreds of them in your sketchbook."

Steve's eyes go all soft, and he gives Bucky one of his gentle smiles. "You remember that."

"Not all of it." He steps closer, lets Steve drape an arm around his shoulders, warm and companionable. "There's a lot more bad memories than good ones."

"The HYDRA things?"

"Yeah. And the train. And—before, when you were sick all the time."

Steve grimaces. "I miss a lot of things, but not asthma." They're quiet for a moment, standing side by side on the pavement along a quiet street. Presently Steve says, "We can always change the ratio by making more good memories, I guess."

Bucky leans in to kiss him, just a brush of lips against cheek because they're in public and he's still not sure how much he can get away with. His arm does the Thing, and suddenly he's thinking of bubble baths and he's laughing. Steve gives him a look. " _What_?"

"Nothing, punk," he says. "Hurry up and drive me home, it's your goddamn bike."

"I can't, I borrowed Tony's car to come after you, you jerk."

"Leave it here, he can send someone tomorrow."

"He'll kill us—" 

"Come on," Bucky says, propelling Steve towards the bike and climbing on behind him. A brisk wind is picking up, but the engine is radiating enough heat to warm them both. "You saved the world, now you get to enjoy it. Drive faster, I like the wind. Can we take the long way home?"

**Author's Note:**

> come cry with me about Steve and Bucky on [tumblr](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com) or check out my [gay arch-nemeses novel](http://valeaida.tumblr.com/post/149576789996/an-elegy-info-post) maybe


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